Wild About Writing

It was a year for good reading, and the outpouring of new books — despite problems besetting the publishing and book selling communities — never let up in 2011.

While I enjoy a good novel, my reading preference has always been for non-fiction. I read heavily for research. I’ve been soaking up many books on French and Parisian history, as I hope to do a book some day on a particular episode in French history in which I’ve long had an interest.

But at year’s end, I’ll differentiate from reading for research and reading for pleasure. This posting is about reading for pleasure.

I find the Best Seller lists to be indifferent guides to my own choices. In the Globe and Mail’s year-end non-fiction and fiction best seller lists (25 each), I found only three books that I’d cared enough about to buy and read. I did better by the National Post with its best books of 2011.

Three I enjoyed from that (shorter)  list were Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon and Schuster Canada) and two novels, The Paris Wife, by Paula McClain (Bond Street Books) and  A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe (McClelland and Stewart). My reviews  of A Good Man and The Paris Wife are in my archives.

My choice for book of the year in the non-fiction department is In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson (Crown Publishers). This is a provocative and compelling account of the rise of Nazi Germany, as seen through the eyes of U.S. Ambassador William E. Dodd and his family — especially his daughter, Martha. As gripping as any thriller, it portrays the family’s encounters with high Nazi officials (Martha was introduced to Hitler at a lunch) and reveals the monstrous details of the German regime that were evident within months of Hitler’s taking power.

Dodd arrives in Berlin as a naive university professor, convinced from the student days he spent in Germany that the cultured nation he knew so well would never embrace the evil threats that  accompanied Hitler’s rise to power. Mildly anti-Semitic himself, he is at first an apologist for Germany’s persecution of its Jews, but it is not long before he comes to realize “Mankind is in grave danger, but democratic governments seem to not know what to do.” Dodd is eased out of his ambassadorship, and returns to America disillusioned with both his own country and Germany.

I found a second book by Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (Crown), equally enthralling. This is also  a gem of narrative non-fiction writing, and tells the story of the architects behind the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893, and the monster who lurked unseen in that city at the same time, indulging in murders and depravity without apparent interference.

A fine  book, The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (Vintage Canada) by John Vaillant, won the $50,000 British Columbia prize for Canadian non-fiction in 2011.As readable as any novel, it deals with the fine balance between nature, wildlife, and man in Russian Siberia. Focused on the behavior of one particular man-eating tiger, it also describes the environmental desecration that brought on a frightful confrontation between the animal and the men who work the Russian taiga. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the tiger.

I enjoyed The Tiger almost as much as Vaillant’s earlier work, The Golden Spruce, about the destruction of the oldest and largest tree in B.C.’s Haida Gwaii islands. Both books carry strong environmental messages which resonate equally powerfully.

Another Canadian book that I enjoyed this year was Charles Foran’s Mordecai Richler biography, Mordecai: The Life and Times ((Alfred A. Knopf). It scored the hit trick in Canadian non-fiction prizes, and deservedly so.

Two books I read largely for research, both dealing with chunks of Paris history, also turned out to be enjoyable for their own sake. Anyone fascinated by that great city should read them: The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (Simon & Schuster) by historian David McCullough, and Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (W,W. Norton) by Graham Robb. McCullough recounts the effects of Paris on American expatriats there between 1830 and 1900. Robb describes delicious episodes from Paris history from the early 19th century to the Second World War.

Finally, a bit of fun reading I had in 2011. I enjoyed two books by Maureen Jennings: Season of Darkness (McClelland & Stewart) and one of her inimitable Murdoch Murder mysteries, Poor Tom is Cold (McClelland & Stewart). Don’t expect the pseudo-science fiction twists of TV’s Murdoch series, but you can expect a faithful remaking of 1890s Toronto in the Poor Tom book.

All in all, a good reading year. May 2012 be as strong!

One of the proudest boasts of Canadian history is that we settled the West peacefully and without violence, while our American neighbors drenched themselves in the blood and killings of Indian wars and lawless cowboy shoot-outs when America turned its face toward the Pacific after the carnage of the Civil War.

In modern times, our sense of moral superiority has been burnished by our creation of national healthcare and a universal social safety net, and in avoiding the worst of the global financial mess. Assumptions like these embolden the myths that nations take to their breasts as their strongest-held beliefs, and Canada is no exception.

At least one of these myths is severely tested in the latest work from Canada’s preeminent western novelist, Guy Vanderhaeghe, whose thick, rich novel, A Good Man (McClelland & Stewart) is in the running for the top fiction awards of 2011.

Vanderhaeghe has built his novel on the detritus of the 20 years following the Civil War. Between 1860 and 1880, the tensions of western settlement spilled across the American border into Canada, putting a nervous edge on relationships between Washington and Ottawa. The U.S., intent on using its Army to annihilate the Indian tribes of its northern plains,looked for Canadian cooperation in preventing the tribes, especially Chief Sitting Bull’s Sioux, from fighting back behind the safety of the “Medicine Line” that divided the two countries. In British Canada, meanwhile, a few hundred men of the Northwest Mounted Police were charged with chasing whiskey traders and keeping the peace as white settlement began to trickle into what would become Saskatchewan and Alberta.

In A Good Man, a disillusioned Mountie, free to leave the force after his term of duty, departs Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills, with the intention of setting himself up with a cattle ranch in Montana. Wesley Case carries a terrible secret in his heart, the guilt of an incident from a long-ago battle in Ontario when he led a regiment of Canadian Militia against an Irish Fenian invasion.

Case goes as the unpaid agent of the NWMP’s Major James Walsh, having agreed to keep him informed of the activities of the U.S. Army commander in the Montana Territory. It is shortly after the massacre of Gen. George Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The Americans are terrified of further Indian attacks, most fearful of all of Chief Sitting Bull, whose tribe is wandering somewhere in the Territory.

Sitting Bull’s escape to Canada, where he is sympathetically received by Walsh, does little to ease American fears. They dread the possibility of further Indian resistance, and demand his surrender and confinement to a reserve.

Meanwhile, much is happening to Case. He finds a ranch, begins a curiously restrained affair with Ada Tarr, wife of a disreputable Fort Benton lawyer, and finds his life under the threat of Michael Dunne, a man who has been tracking Case since his days back in Ontario.  In Dunne, Vanderhaeghe has created one of the most bestial characters of Canadian literature.

Vanderhaeghe resists the temptation to present Canadian treatment of the plains Indians as much better than what they suffered in the U.S. True, there was  no genocide as happened under the U.S. Army. But Canada betrayed Sitting Bull by starving his tribe into submission, forcing its return to the US. There, he becomes a carnival object in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show before he is murdered in 1890 by a native policeman acting on U.S. Army orders.

A Good Man has no shortage of dramatic episodes but does the relatively minor diplomatic standoff between Canada and the United States really warrant the 464 pages of this hefty tome? As an author who advocates that novelists take off their historian’s hats, Vanderhaeghe devotes interminable pages to historical exposition. An almost endless number of letters between Case and Walsh depict the tensions between the Major and his U.S. Army counterpart. Much of this gets in the way of a gripping good story. It would be more powerful if it had been 25,000 words shorter.

Vanderhaeghe’s new work completes a trilogy of Western novels, following The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing. It may not be his strongest, but it is a fitting finale to the series.

Where are the artists and writers in the Occupy movement? Whether it’s in New York, London or Toronto, the creative workers whose images and ideas both reflect and define society’s truths, are notable by their absence.

Does this mean the Occupy movement — disorganized and disparate as it is — lacks worthwhile purpose and goals? No,  because the reduction of social and economic injustice has always been at the heart of great literature.

In Canada, Margaret Atwood became the focal point of protest against closing public libraries in Toronto. She simply gave a few interviews, urged people to sign a petition, and the response was so overwhelming that the Ford Brothers soon backed off their “gravy train” blather.

Here’s another issue that writers and artists could put their efforts toward: reform of the country’s drug laws. The timing is right. There’s no more costly or socially harmful policy than our existing laws covering both soft and hard drugs. Neil Reynolds of The Globe and Mail has an eloquent call for reform here.

For an expert’s view, one has the work of the noted American jurist, James Gray, in his Temple University book:

Gray, a  California Superior Court judge, warned as long ago as 1992 that “our country’s attempt through the criminal
justice system to combat drug use and abuse, and all of the crime and misery that accompany them” was not working.

Judge Gray examines practically every aspect of the drug dilemma, but his major conclusion is that the so-called “war on drugs” will never be won. You have to get the profit motive out of it first. That means legalization, with appropriate regulations and precautions. We need to do as the Americans have done in Iraq – declare victory and get out.

My own view (expressed today in the Globe and Mail) is that the crimes committed by addicts to fund their illegal drug habits cause far greater harm to society than their usage of the drugs. Legalization, with all the attendant regulations and medical provisions that would go with it, would offer a far more humane and economical outcome.

If one were to set out to devise a policy to create maximum social harm with the greatest waste of taxpayers’ money, one could do no better than copy our present drug laws. They are the result of several generations of bunkum law and order propaganda entirely lacking in scientific credence. Their most notable achievement has been the entrenchment of a murderous, and immensely profitable, illegal drug trade.

Any government which continues to cling to the war on drugs is, in effect, making war on all its people, addicts or not.

The PBS network recently ran the wonderful Ken Burns series on Prohibition in the United States. That was a noble but failed experiment to eliminate a particular drug and it had to be finally abandoned. I wonder how many people,watching that series, came to the same conclusion about today’s war on drugs?

Travelling about Europe this past week, I followed the sad news of the death of Jack Layton, and his funeral today (Saturday, August 27) in Toronto. I write this in the Toronto International Airport, awaiting ground transportation to take me home.

So much has been said and written about Jack Layton that anything I could add would probably be redundant. I last spoke to Jack one Saturday morning when Deborah and I encountered him in a bookstore on Danforth Avenue. He was filling the role of the “constituency man.” getting about his riding and keeping in touch with people and things.

Margaret Wente has a lovely account of Jack’s funeral at Globe and Mail Online.

Jack Layton’s death was the subject of a long account I read in the International Herald Tribune while in Paris. I was there doing some research on a book idea.

Interestingly, there’s been quite a bit of Canada in the European press this week. The Sino Forest scandal on Bay Street made the Financial Times of London, and I ran across a review of Maureen Jennings’ new book, Season of Darkness. She’s the author of the books behind that great TV series, Murdoch Mysteries, featuring an 1890s’ Toronto detective with a flair for solving cases through clever use of newly emerging scientific criminology.

In Paris, we watched with several thousands others the ceremonies in front of l’Hotel de Ville commemorating the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944.  This year tribute was paid to the resistants who rose against the Germans in the final days of the Occupation. It was a moving ceremony and while the crowd was not large by Parisian standards, it included many young people, presumably all mindful of the importance of that historic day.

Back in Canada, the prevailing sentiment in wake of the death of Jack Layton seems to be a yearning for politicians to learn from the positive and optimistic view he expressed so eloquently, especially in his final campaign. I have always felt that the first priority of a national leader should be to provide people with reason to feel positive about their country and themselves. Not blind patriotism of the flag waving type so endemic to the United States, but a genuine sense of delight about a country’s prospects and the promise it holds for its people and their place in the world.

It is probably unrealistic to expect the aura around Jack Layton’s passing to persist for more than a brief moment. But one can hope that the flame he set alight will burn in the hearts of men and women in our public life for a very long time to come.

On August 25, 1944, Paris was liberated by the U.S. 4th Infantry Division and the  2nd Armoured Division of Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s  Fighting French. Every year since then, Parisians have gathered on this date to celebrate the restoration of their city’s freedom. Among the celebrated personalities who helped “liberate” Paris was Ernest Hemingway, at the head of his own rag-tag little army. He checked out the bar at the Ritz Hotel where he’d drank many a martini, visited his friend Sylvia Beach who’d had to give up her Shakespeare & Co. bookshop during the occupation, then returned to the Ritz to share a dinner with eight officers. They signed each other’s menus with the identical inscription: “We think we took Paris!”

So this is a good time to be reading Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife (Bond Street Books), a fictional rendering of Ernest Hemingway’s marriage to his first wife, Hadley Richardson. It is a story well-known to anyone who has read Hemingway biographies, yet it sympathetically explores the emotions and attitudes that Hadley and Ernest must have shared and felt, in a way that is possible only in a work of fiction.Nevertheless, The Paris Wife is faithful to the historical record.

Hadley Richardson was an earnest and adventurous midwestern girl when she met Hemingway in Chicago in 1920. He wooed her there and by love letters he sent her when she returned to her home in St. Louis. They married in September, 1921. Hemingway had made up his mind to go to Europe to pursue a writing life, intending to settle in Rome. Sherwood Anderson urged him to go to Paris instead, and gave him letters of introduction to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach.

The novelty of the bohemian life they found in Paris was entrancing to both Ernest and Hadley.The young wife adjusts slowly to the cafe life, the drinking and the trips that Ernest makes throughout Europe on assignments for the Toronto Star. When he is sent to cover a conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, Hadley is sick in bed, and Ernest goes ahead. When she follows, a few nights later, she commits the sin of which Ernest will never really forgive her. She puts all his manuscripts in a valise and sets out for the train. Somehow, she loses the valise, either to a thief or to absent-mindedness. The reader shares her dismay when she discovers this, and the pain when she has to tell Ernest what has happened. He rushes back to Paris thinking Hadley could not possibly have done as she had said. The manuscripts are nowhere to be found.

When she became pregnant, Ernest decides the baby should be born in North America. The couple return to Toronto, but Ernest is soon distraught at the petty politics of the Star and the dullness of life in this proper Protestant city. “Toronto’s dead,” Paula McLain has Ernest telling Hadley. “We can’t stay here.”

The Paris Wife is a chronicle of adventure, love, and despair, an absorbing and illuminating story of two lives descending into an inevitable pit of defeat. One cannot read it without experiencing the taste and hearing the sounds of Paris life. Hemingway’s own memory of his Paris life, as in A Moveable Feast, is reflected unerringly in this novel, as incident on incident piles up, adding stress to the marriage.

One watches, fascinated, as Pauline Pfeiffer, who will become Ernest’s second wife, enters their lives. She is not merely tolerated but welcomed by Hadley, even after she realizes Hemingway has been sleeping with her. But it is the scenes in Spain, where Hemingway has gone to write his masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises, that McLain depicts to most painfully register the dismay Hadley feels over what is happening.

The book is at its strongest in its final chapters, where Hadley realizes she can no longer be a dull but loyal wife, and that he will soon leave her, ready to begin not just another marriage but another epic work of literature. Scott Fitzgerald, who with Zelda is seldom absent from this book, is said to have concluded that Ernest needed a new wife for every big new book.

The Paris Wife is about a great writer, his moral lapses, his intensity and his determination to “write well and true,” as well as about the woman who shared the early years of his success. But most of all, it is about an age, one that perhaps never really existed beyond the pages of the books that Hemingway and his contemporaries would write, but one that continues to fascinate, and will have everlasting appeal.

I will be in Paris for this year’s Liberation Day ceremony. A martini at the Ritz, and a salute to The Paris Wife will be in order.

The mini boom in Canada’s largest city in support of Margaret Atwood for Mayor raises some interesting questions. Would the 71-year-old novelist, poet and sometime political activist ever seriously consider jumping into politics? And if she did run for Mayor of Toronto, could she win?

To this point, the gathering support for Atwood for Mayor is not much more than a lighthearted fling, a spontaneous outbreak of enthusiasm following her intervention in the debate over the future of the city’s library system.

The novelist is accustomed to taking stands on issues affecting arts and culture. She’s been a bitter critic of Stephen Harper. Now, in the wake of Mayor Rob Ford’s determination to “cut the gravy” from city spending, she’s become the prime proponent of saving the Toronto Public Library’s 99 branches that circulate more books than any other system in North America.

Ms. Atwood started it all with a Tweet to her 233,361 followers on July 21, responding to the KPMG report that identified library closings as a possible way of helping the city out of the $750 million hole that Mayor Rob Ford has dug it into in the first year of his term.

The Tweet heard round Canada: “Toronto’s libraries are under threat of privatization. Tell city council to keep them public now.” Her appeal drove readers to an online petition on a web site of the Library Workers Union. The site promptly crashed, and as I write (Sunday, July 31) it’s attracted 41,499 signatures.

More pointed Tweets followed, including this one:

“Twin Fordmayor cld fight for fair shake from ON, but that’s not the agenda? T(he)y want to trash old folks + readers + working moms instead?

The Twin Ford reference cleverly links in the Mayor’s witless brother, Doug Ford, who promptly denied any knowledge of who Margaret Atwood might be, or what she does.

“Good luck to Margaret Atwood, I don’t even know her. She could walk right by me – I wouldn’t have a clue who she is,”  Ford said in response to Atwood’s tweets. “Tell her to go run in the next election and get democratically elected. I’m happy to sit down and listen to Margaret Atwood.”

So how about it, Margaret Atwood. Would you run for Mayor?

Anyone who knows her knows that Margaret Atwood could never fill the role of a back-slapping politician. But she wouldn’t be the first artist to go for political office. I’m thinking of Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and poet dissident who was the President of free Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. Or Jan Paderewski, the great Polish composer and pianist who was the second Prime Minister of an independent Poland after the First World War.

Would Ms. Atwood have the interest, the stamina, or the ability to withstand the inanities of a political life? Anyone who’s been through the ordeal of author tours as she has, surely has the stamina. Age is not a factor. Look at Hazel McCallion, long-serving mayor of neighboring Mississauga, and at 90 only now is in what will be her final term.

But let’s face it, Margaret Atwood running for Mayor of Toronto is a highly unlikely prospect.

Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment, and pretend Toronto voters could choose between Atwood and Ford in the next election.The campaign would be highly entertaining, pitting culture against the barbarians. However, like all things political, it probably wouldn’t be fought on any rational understanding of issues facing the city. The Ford forces would depict Margaret Atwood as a “tax and spend liberal.” She’d fight back, brilliantly, but perhaps not successfully.

The library controversy is a case in point. It would be nice to have a rational discussion of the cost/benefits of the city’s chain of libraries. Doug Ford claimed, erroneously, there were more branches in  his Etobicoke district than there were Tim Hortons coffee shops. Not true, but what’s that got to do with it?

With the city hard pressed to cover its costs, perhaps a rational analysis might turn up one or two libraries that could be closed without depriving anyone of reasonable access. Even if that were the case, the savings would be miniscule. But it would give Mayor Ford the spoon of gravy that he needs to feed the right-wing voters who put him in office.

As of today, Margaret Atwood is off Twitter for a week, busy on a writing project. Maybe she’ll tell us when she comes back how she would feel about becoming a politician.

Not many people in the West knew or cared much about the fate of three small Baltic countries in eastern Europe that suffered through Russian occupation, German invasion, and the return of the Soviets late in the Second World War.

Only since the collapse of the USSR and the demolition of the Iron Curtain has the return to freedom of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania been duly noted and celebrated.

Antanas Sileika’s novel Underground (Thomas Allen, $15.64) is a notable addition  to the literature of that great conflict, delivering a suspenseful and poignant love story set against the harsh cruelties and risk-filled lives of its protagonist Lukas and his lover and wife Elena.  In its weaving of a rich tapestry of love, history, war and politics, it is reminiscent of Dr. Zhivago in its focus on the lives of a man and a woman who must put their resistance to oppression ahead of their personal happiness.

I became acquainted with Antanas Sileika in his capacity as artistic director of the Humber School for Writers in Toronto. His masterful evocation of conditions in Lithuania under Soviet occupation immediately after the war aptly demonstrates his strengths as a writer as well as a teacher.

I found Sileika’s ability to weave factual history into a dramatic narrative especially compelling. The book at times reads as a work of  non-fiction in its depiction of the mid-century turmoil that gripped eastern Europe:

“What followed was such a confusing war on that side of Europe! The war was much easier to understand in the West, where the forces of more or less good triumphed in May 1945. On the Eastern side, on the other hand, the messy side, the war sputtered on in pockets for another decade, fought by partisans who came out of their secret bunkers by night.”

Lukas was one of those partisans, and the book begins with a shocking slaughter carried out by he and Elena when they lure a clutch of Soviet underlings to a supposed engagement party. Forced into hiding, they live in forest bunkers until, in a raid that scours a village of most of its life, Lukas comes to believe that Elena has been killed.

Lukas is sent into the West as an emissary of the Lithuanian underground, carrying an appeal for help. Why hasn’t America dropped an atomic bomb on Moscow, some wonder. When he reaches Paris he becomes involved with a Lithuanian refugee, Monika, whom he marries and with whom he fathers a son. When he hears that Elena may be still alive, he abandons Monika and returns on a risk-filled trip to his home country. There, one way or another, his destiny will be decided.

Underground gains momentum as it builds toward its inevitable climax. There is an interesting Canadian connection, which is not surprising in view of the author’s declaration that the story has been inspired by his own family’s history, as well as the experiences of their Lithuanian countrymen. This is a powerfully imagined book which reminds us that political oppression in whatever form eventually brings on a wrathful vengeance. One cannot help but reflect on how similar stories must at this very moment be working their way out in countries like Libya, Syria and Iran.

The first time I heard Bob Rae speak was at a breakfast meeting of the Board of Trade in Toronto where he discussed a new federal budget — back about 1988. He was the leader of the Ontario NDP at the time. His critique was rational, reasonable, and surprisingly non-partisan. Later that day, I heard him on the radio blasting the Peterson Liberal government — shrill, filled with invective, harshly political. I had heard twp Bob Raes that day.

Now that he is the interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, I’m wondering whether a third Bob Rae is not emerging: seasoned, sensible, committed to values more than to strategy, a voice that can talk sense to the party’s inner core and motivate the grassroots to assert themselves in ways that’s never happened before.

There are bound to be a lot of rocks ahead on the Liberal road, and we can expect a few stumbles. I talk about some of these in the new e-edition of my book, Turning Points: the Campaigns That Changed Canada. This book was originally published in 2004. I’ve updated it with a fresh chapter 1 on the 2011 election. It’s available online ($9.95), here, and here. I’ll give you a preview of some of what I have to say about the Liberal party:

“If wisdom prevails – a not always certain assumption in politics – the Liberal party will focus neither on leadership nor on winning the next election, but instead will search for ways to build a new
kind of party, infuse it with the energy of the grassroots that has never been deployed, and address issues that matter to Canadians from a long-term, non-ideological perspective. This would mean
a long period of soul-searching and investigation to identify policies that are needed to strengthen Canada in the coming century, not necessarily calculated to produce victory at the next election.
The greatest challenge facing Canada will be to equip the population with the skills to lead successful lives in an increasingly technological society. This will require ideas that go far beyond giving
students a few thousand dollars to help pay their post-secondary tuition.

“The second great challenge will be to achieve transition to an economy that is less reliant on fossil fuels, a course that will be fraught with frustration when the inefficiencies of wind and solar power
become more apparent. Social and health issues will become increasingly important, with one of the most urgent needs being to develop an alternative to the failed “war on drugs,” something likely
to be found only by harnessing the resources of the healthcare system in place of reliance on police and prisons. More meaningful roles for parliamentarians have to be found, the power of the
Prime Minister’s office needs to be curbed, and consideration must be given to further democratization of political life, perhaps through such new ideas as turning the office of the Governor
General into an elective, presidential type of position. More of the elements of federal governance need to be located in Western Canada in recognition of that region’s growing importance. Why
couldn’t Parliament meet on occasion in a Western city?

” Canada’s foreign policy needs to be carefully orchestrated toward the encouragement of democracy and human rights in ways that do not
require commitment to Afghanistan and Libya-type military operations. Our relationship with the United States will test future Canadian governments if we are to retain national self-respect and
self-determination. All these issues need to be studied by experts and discussed by the Canadian people, and the Liberal party should play a leadership role in seeing tthis happen.

“In 1992, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man. His book asserted that the world had passed through not just a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such; the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. In a similar manner, the decade marked the Liberal Party of Canada’s own “end of history” – the end of a long period of nation building in which Liberal governments transformed Canada into a modern welfare state, with a modern constitution and charter of rights, a strengthened federal system with protections against secession, and the birth of a multicultural society that despite inherent problems has become a model for the world. Having reached these goals and having tested the limits of affordability of the social safety net, the Liberal party reverted to a short-term policy of brutal fiscal management – as it had to – but in the process lost its sense of national purpose and any claim to a common vision. Now Liberals must find a way to rediscover the energy to deliver new solutions to new problems, if they are to make history again.”

The launch of Apple’s iPad II in Canada this weekend is a great time to discuss the effect of such new reading devices  on both the way we read books, and the way we write them.

I’ve had a Sony Reader for over a year. As one of the first eBook readers, its technology is pretty basic and it’s already been surpassed by the competition — the Kindle, the Kobo (from ChaptersIndigo), the iPad, and the new RIM Playbook.

For that reason, my reading pattern is probably not  typical. When I get around to buying one of the newer products I’ll be better able to measure the difference. For now, I can only say that I’ve used the Sony mainly to download classics I had never gotten around to reading, and specialist books that I would not be inclined to buy in print. For “real” reading, I still prefer the paper version.

But others have a different take on  the effects of the more than ten million electronic reading devices already in use in North America.

Time magazine book reviewer Lev Grossman says these new devices are forcing people to read in different ways:

They scroll and scroll and scroll. You don’t have this business of handling pages and turning them and savouring them.”

As a result, he adds, you get very fast reading, picking up snatches here and there as we do with news off the Internet,  with little or no lingering on the language.

Once we lose the desire to absorb the nuances of descriptive narrative and the beautiful language that the best writers evoke to tell their stories, what point will there be to that kind of writing? Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, E. L. Doctorow — will anybody be reading them? Will their like be seen among future writers?

One of my favorite pieces of writing — in Mark Hume’s River of the Angry Moon (Greystone Books, 1998) –  has taken me back time and again:

“The river is fed by the sky. It runs over a bed of shattered mountains, through the dreams of a great forest and into the mouths of ancient fishes. It starts in clouds as grey and heavy as the sea and ends in a windswept estuary haunted by ghosts. It is a place where white swans dance on dark mud flats and salmon lay fragile eggs in nests of stone.”

You can’t get this in the 140-word bursts of books being written on Twitter. Stories that are written to grab your attention for a moment, for readers who are not very interested in style and beautiful language.

Right now, most eBooks are of course only an electronic version of the original print. But as eBook sales pick up and outpace their hard copy parents (as has happened on Amazon already), writers, agents and publishers are going to be looking at what sells online, and adapting their narratives accordingly.

Already, writers are being forced to speed up their narratives. At the eBook sites, sales are triggered by brief excerpts or quick overviews. More than ever, writers will have to hook readers right away.

“You’re going to want to have blood on the wall by the end of the second paragraph,” adds Lev Grossman.

eBooks are changing the world of publishing in all respects, from pricing to author’s royalties to the opening up of the marketplace to self-publishing. There’s a potential new audience of millions of readers who have seldom or never bought books before.

Whether what they’ll buy — and what they’ll be offered — will represent books as we have known them, only the future will tell.

So go ahead and try out the electronic reader — the reviews says the iPad II is great and that RIM’s new Playbook will be a tough competitor.  Remember that the $500 it costs will buy you a dozen or more hard cover titles — and what it brings you may never match what you already have.

The debate on the role of foreign ownership in Canadian book publishing never seems to go away. Publishing reporter John Barber of The Globe and Mail weighs in today with a long article urging changes in our foreign investment rules to allow foreign publishers to invest in — or buy out — Canadian publishers.

The whole issue of foreign investment in publishing is under review now by Conservative culture minister James Moore.

Barber concedes current rules “helped produce a spectacular literary flowering.” And while allowing that small presses are doing a good job, he laments their lack of financial heft to properly promote their writers.

More Canadian writers are published by the smaller Canadian-owned publishers. But the best sellers usually come from the branch plants of multi national publishers. They have the money to sign — and then promote — the best-known Canadian names. Barber’s argument, shared by some small presses, is that foreign investment in their operations would enable them to better compete with the big branch plants — all to the benefit of both writers and readers.

Facing the digital-only future

Newspapers as well as books are migrating to electronic sales. Montreal’s La Presse, long considered the top daily of French Canada, may be getting ready to phase out its print edition. Its Sunday edition already gone, the paper has assembled a digital team that could move it totally into the digital world.

” … there is a strong possibility that there will no longer be a print edition of a La Presse within three to seven years,’ says the head of the Quebec journalist’s union.

The Montreal daily wouldn’t be the first. Several American papers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have shut their print editions and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has launched the first all electronic newspaper designed for Apple’s iPad — The Daily.

My own E-Book – Boy in the Picture

So maybe now’s the time to mention that my recent book, The Boy in the Picture, is now available as an eBook from Chapters Indigo, among other online retailers. A bargain at $7.79. Thanks, Dundurn Press, for opening up this wider market for me.